#1: welcome or welcome back to my brain
i’m finally addressing *that* blog and *this* blog
hey, friends! welcome to enigmatic conundrums.
the last time i tried to maintain a blog—and perhaps the same time i penned an essay for its own sake—was in 2021. it was during my pandemic-induced gap year from ateneo. and i, thinking i was the main character, bought a domain and started a gap year blog called aj unleashed.
excuse the juvenility of it all! i was 18.
anyway, it’s gone now. i remember being in an all-nighter call with m a year later when i accidentally deleted a plug-in that promptly destroyed the website i worked on incessantly for at least three weeks. i don’t have a backup of all the entries that i uploaded there, so all the work i put into it went down the drain. unfortunately, i was not able to archive the website, nor did wayback machine index it. reflecting on this now i feel like this warrants a thinkpiece about the ephemerality and divisibility of the self on the internet, but i digress. all i was able to salvage from that website were a couple of screenshots from the landing page.
it was corny in retrospect even if i thought it was the shit at the time. (to the people who would repost my entries then: thank you for fanning the embers of my self-aggrandizing delusions.) quite a handful of people would repost my entries—most of them from my freshmen circle, to be fair—especially the one where i explained lengthily what led me to file a leave of absence. that one even became a Subject of Discourse™ about privilege in a reddit thread! how dare an atenean to insinuate that taking a break is a possibility, i remember them saying. (that one sent me into a spiral, i’m not gonna lie.)
through that silly little passion project, i started to chronicle my gap year. but the damning thing about creative work, i’ve been ruminating, is how much of it is working on a project out of passion, and hope someone will resonate with it.
more than be a space for me to document my life as it was happening, it did, truthfully, open opportunities for me. *partly* because of that cringe-worthy website, i ended up getting hired by a magazine editor i met in high school to work for a revamp of a legacy magazine. i was to pitch in my “young” voice and perspective, the editors told me. what a heavy burden and once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to carry at 19. i quit when i went back to the university as it was too much to handle at the time.
now at 21, i write for publications here and there. it is, of course, gratifying to see people being interested in the stuff i put out but sometimes i think: what a disservice to myself—and the reading public—to do my thinking on the public sphere! it is obscene.
i could journal, but i cannot resist the idea that anyone might resonate with anything i’m saying. i like the idea of indeterminate opportunities and connections i have formed with all sorts of people and subject matters because of the things i sent out into the ether.
most of all, i also have this creeping instinct that my day-to-day is fleeting. i’m inundated by modern life and i want to remember. when i get older, i want to have something to look back on. unfortunately (and embarrassing) for me, something i’ve learned and trained my muscles to do is that the only way i can force myself to write is if it’s for an outward audience. i hope to unlearn this, but for now, i’d like to bear witness to what’s happening to me and around me in this space i can call mine. i don’t know who said it first but it’s real: days are long but the years are short.
i chose the name enigmatic conundrums because life presents us with enigmatic conundrums all the time, like the bunch of bananas i got—likely exported from the philippines—that got rotten so fast in my dorm room here in japan. hence the photo of a rotten banana. also enigmatic and conundrum are such beautiful words. i tend to overcomplicate everything (thanks, academia… or social anxiety) and this is a space dedicated to making sense of, well, enigmatic conundrums, collective and personal.
if i’m being honest, the only reason why i’m writing an introductory post for this substack when i should be doing the actual writing instead of writing about writing is i’m procrastinating. i’m down to the last stretch of my semester here at sophia in tokyo. as always, i’m struggling with finals week. something about me and matters involving conclusions. but it’s just insane to me how in a couple of days, i will be flying back to manila. i will have a lot of processing to do.
if you’ve reached this point, thank you for indulging. sign-up to be part of my mailing list if you haven’t yet. i hope to see you again next time.
some recommendations
i’ve been off twitter (i refuse to call it x, respectfully) but i want to share media i’ve been consuming lately! although feel free to follow me @ajrayearth.
🎬 movies
directed by ross brothers, it follows a bunch of teenage kids going on a road trip. i had never thought i’ve been so uptight and had lost a sense of spontaneity until i watched this. stream it in mubi.
🌟dominion (2023)
an experimental short by bea mariano that meditates on colonial trauma and the power of images. it was recently named a finalist of ccp gawad alt. it captures, i think, what it’s like to think through something while constantly being distracted by the demands of contemporary life. i wrote about it in last week’s issue of young star—do give it a read!
🎧songs
🌟 sundo by imago
it’s a filipino classic that i always hear in karaoke. i’ve never really appreciated it until i listened to it intently and the lyrics are insane: “i’ve been combing the entire world / to look, to look for you / i’ve wandered the district of your melancholy / i will carry, i will carry you.” that’s a simp right there. (translation mine lol)🌟 changes by antwon and kerry mccoy
it’s the final song from gasoline rainbow’s soundtrack. it makes me feel things.🌟 spring is coming with a strawberry in the mouth by caroline polachek
“there are so many things i want / but mainly / and like everybody / i want, i want, i want, i-i want to be loved.”
📚 books
🌟 the mushroom at the end of the world by anna tsing
how do i describe this book? it’s a beautifully written ethnography of japanese matsutake mushroom trade that talks about salvage accumulation, indeterminacy, ruination, and the possibility life amidst the constant state of precarity. i understand that this abstract and dense description might not be building a case for it but it’s such a great read! it reminds me of tadiar’s remaindered life, which is coming out on ateneo press.
i’ve never opened gmail so fast